1. There’s still some hurdle before new-eLife will send your paper out for review. This is not necessarily “quality” or “impact” level; they say it will depend on whether they can provide a helpful and effective review.

People had very mixed experiences with old-eLife’s editorial decisions, and some felt it was a bit clubby: papers from some labs sailed through to acceptance while similar work from others got editorially rejected (without review) for seemingly minor reasons. Their policy against requesting new experiments could certainly be used as a cudgel: an editor can just say you’re not convinced by a control and the paper’s DOA.

Thus, they are both uniquely positioned to make sweeping changes and have people doubt them.

2. The reviews use a controlled vocabulary, so I think you’d say eLife (excellent approach, major impact) or whatever the words are.

Yes, but now the authors don't need to manually decide to also share their research elsewhere - something they've (in many, but not all, disciplines) been trained not to do as publishers traditionally wouldn't allow it.

The fuss is about publication and approval being seen as linked in the academic hivemind. Even if you're able to see them as separate steps yourself, that doesn't mean that the academic world at large sees them as such, so if this fails to gain widespread acceptance, the reputation of eLife-the-journal might suffer, and having been published there will no longer look as good on your CV as it currently does.

In other words, the people who are afraid of reputational loss are the ones who have benefited the most from the broken system of academic publishing.

I won't cry for them.

The main question is: will those people be able to prevent this change from happening. From the article, it looks like they've been able to delay it already.